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Yet another piece of technology originally expected to surface in Longhorn looks as if it won't make it into the product. The latest element to get the ax is "Monad," aka MSH (Microsoft Shell), which Microsoft Corp. has touted as its alternative to the scripting shells that Unix and Linux programmers know and love.

Microsoft officials have described Monad as the scripting shell for Longhorn and have made public beta versions of the technology available to testers for a couple of years.

One beta tester explained Monad this way: "The idea [behind Monad] is easy: Build a decent, programmable, scriptable shell language/facility. MSH is a combination of the command line abilities of a BASH shell, the richness of a programming language like Perl or Ruby, combined with the rigor and common sense of .NET."

Rumors that Microsoft officially had cut Monad from Longhorn began circulating last week. When asked last week if Monad was still slated to be part of Longhorn, the Windows client team declined to comment. A representative with the Windows Server team said that Microsoft had not committed to a ship vehicle for Monad.

In an interview published on Microsoft's Web site this week to coincide with Microsoft's Tech Ed conference, Senior Vice President Bob Muglia acknowledged that Monad won't make it into either the Longhorn client or server.